Penny for Your Thoughts

My colleague Adam, a Multimedia Instruction Coordinator at the Gelardin New Media Center at
Georgetown University, recently wrote up his observations from the Penny Conference in NY on teaching, creativity, and innovation. It's a nice reminder that in addition to imparting information, part of our job is to inspire inspiration. You can link to the original post here.

Dr. Tony Wagner on stage at Penny 2012

Penny 2012: A reflection on Skillshare.com’s first conference

Last Friday, I attended Skillshare.com‘s first annual Penny Conference in New York. The event was very similar to a TED conference: it consisted mainly of a series of short talks centered around the theme of education innovation. You can view videos of the entire conference by clicking here. They put together quite a diverse panel of speakers: faculty from Harvard and NYU; a restaurateur; a 14-year-old TED veteran and teacher; several entrepreneurs; and a former investment banker who started an organization to build schools in developing countries.

The afternoon-long gathering was big on ideas and inspiration. This wasn’t the kind of conference where you learn new information or skills. It was all about dreaming big, thinking differently, and pursuing an audacious vision of learning in the 21st century.

I found a lot of inspiration in the talks, but there were a few key themes that really stood out to me. The biggest of these is that learning is, and always has been, driven by human curiosity, as this fantastic video from Skillshare illustrates. It was curiosity that drove me to spend hours of my childhood reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica on my friend’s living room floor. Curiosity was the fuel behind the (unfortunately, recently discontinued) NASA Shuttle program, and its predecessor, the Apollo program. Curiosity took Darwin to Galapagos, and led Newton to his principia.

And it’s curiosity, paired with creativity, that leads to innovation. Dr. Tony Wagner from Harvard University called for a shift from a consumer-driven culture to an innovation-driven culture in his talk. And the task of educators in this is to call forth their students’ curiosity and creativity; to create an environment that challenges students to take risks, and rewards those who do. Prof. Kio Stark of NYU pointed out the central role of failure in the learning process, and how penalizing failure handicaps our students’ growth and crushes their curiosity. 14-year-old Adora Svitak emphasized the need for teachers to model and encourage a love for learning in their own lives and in their instruction, because if students develop a love for learning, they will learn more and go further than we can imagine.

The clear takeaway for me from the Penny conference was that education should be about inspiration, far more than mere information. To be sure, facts and information are critical; but without inspiration, facts will be forgotten, and without empowerment, information will never translate to innovation and action.

Citing Art: A Selection of Style Manuals

Lee Sorensen of the Lilly Library at Duke University recently wondered what style guides colleagues were referencing for art citations. What follows is a summary of the responses, which overwhelming prefer Purdue's Owl, the Chicago Manual of Style, and the Diana Hacker Reasearch & Documentation Online site. Duplicate mentions were removed for clarity.

Thanks, Lee!

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[Cristine Rom, Library Director, Gund Library: A Library for Visual Artists]

We have art and design examples in our MLA and Turbian/Chicago style guides on our web page www.cia.edu/library in the specialized guides section which our students find very handy.

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[Bronwen Billeti, Associate Librarian, Center for Curatorial Studies, Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College:]

The first is an online version of a print source, Research and Documentation in the Electronic Age, Fifth Edition, by Diana Hacker and Barbara Fister, hosted by St. Martin's. It has excellent examples of both Chicago and MLA and has a lovely graphic annotation style, which is very easy on the eyes.

General page: http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/resdoc5e/index.htm
MLA page example: http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/resdoc5e/RES5e_ch08_s1-0011.html

Emily Carr Writing Centre MLA Style Guide
PDF linked on this page http://www.ecuad.ca/library/research/citationguides
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[Carmen Orth-Alfie, University of Kansas]

Check out Cite Source done by Trinity College Library in Hartford, Conn. http://citesource.trincoll.edu/.  This is project support by a CTW Mellon Grant and they use a Creative Commons license.  Here is an example, http://citesource.trincoll.edu/chicago/documents/chicagoartwork.pdf that is for “art work” using the Chicago style.

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 [Solvej Vorster, Librarian : Hiddingh Hall Library, University of Cape Town]

Our Library devised its own handbook and it was revised recently.  You can find it here: http://www.lib.uct.ac.za/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/citationhandbook.pdf

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 [Rebecca Friedman, Princeton]

I’ve put up a few things on my LibGuide, which probably needs to be updated at this point, but feel free to point to only if it’s useful.

URL: http://libguides.princeton.edu/artfaq

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[Dawn Sueoka Consulting Archivist, Shangri La, Doris Duke Foundation]

The Association of Art Editors Style Guide may be a good place to start:

http://www.artedit.org/styleguide.htm

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[Christine L. Sundt, Editor
Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation]

Based on my experience as an editor using Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.), I  highly recommend it for those of us working in the arts: it covers captions, exhibitions, catalogs, and much more (CMOS is available both in print and online. The online version allows for keyword searching as well as creating your own annotations and lists. The CMOS editors also answer questions about things not covered or ambiguously described, in their monthly Q&A, the answers of which are also available to online subscribers (which is a bargain at $35/annually).
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[Moira Steven, Library Director, Joanne Waxman Library @ Maine College of Art]

I've been using the book Cite Right as a source for most kinds of citation in most formats.  I'm also referring students to BibMe.org, which is quite good - and free!

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[Linda Duychak , Kohler Art Library Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison]

Also not what you asked for, but perhaps useful, is this citation generator.  It creates citations in MLA and Chicago, although not footnote cites.

http://www.calvin.edu/library/knightcite/

A local librarian recommended this to me a year or so ago.  I haven't registered or used it extensively.  But when I checked it quickly, the results looked accurately formatted to me.

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 [Helen Chapman, Hawaii]

Not the answer to your question, but something related that may be helpful to your students.

After using MS Word 2010 a few times, I find the REFERENCES function to work well for footnotes, endnotes and bibliographies, without having to refer to style manuals. You choose among Chicago, Turabian, APA and a few others; choose the kind of citation (book, article, etc.); then fill in a template.

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 [Heidi Rempel, MSLIS student, Syracuse University]

Unfortunately, they don't have a Chicago guide but the OWL writing lab at Purdue has an excellent set of MLA and APA citation examples that I've used rather a lot in my MSLIS work over the last couple of years.  http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/   They do have a citation comparison that includes Chicago at   http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/949/01/ in PDF format

Toronto Meeting Notes

40th Annual Conference
Toronto, Canada March 29–April 2, 2012
Reference and Information Services Section
March 30, 2012
Moderators: Amy Ballmer and Emilee Mathews
Anna Simon, AWS News and RISS Blog Contributor
Link to 2011 minutes
56 attendees

Committee introductions: Emilee Mathews is new co-moderator, Anna Simon is blog news contributor.

Update on RISS activity
· Libguide and Pathfinder directory, started by Virginia Allison, is up on blog. All
guides have come from ARLIS/NA members!
· Special thanks to Mia D’Avanza, Emilee Mathews, Ellen Petraits, and Kate Wilson for making this happen.
· Directory hopefully being turned into ARLIS/NA e-publication; sent to Hannah Bennett, Professional Resources Editor of Communications & Publications Committee, for consideration as addition to the ARLIS website.
· Future goals for guide: juried submissions, annotations,
keyword tagging, subject headings, various methods of searching/indexing.
· Need someone/s to help develop the database after approval—there is column in sign-in list for people to check their interest—that includes jurors, apply metadata, etc.,
· Current guidelines for submission: should be appropriate for multiple users—not just art history or for art historians.
Other criteria?

· RISS blog
· In past year has taken a backseat to Pathfinder directory, but moderators are very interested in developing it as professional space that supports reference and information service providers.
· Ideas for blog include:
o Anything that creates a community, provides support, and helps us do our jobs
o Recruiting library science students to write
entries
o Reposting relevant list-serv posts including content from other great library blogs and websites:
· In the Library with a Lead Pipe
· Info-Mational
· Chronicle blogs
· Museum library blogs
· All Things Visual
· RUSA, ACRL, etc.,
· Features on RISS members—what they’re doing and how
· Spotlight new reference resources—digital and print
· Spotlight new ideas about art info dissemination
· Museum and library exhibits, special collection happenings

· Interested in contributing? Contact Emilee Mathews (mathewse@umail.iu.edu) or Anna Simon (ajs299@georgeotown.edu)

· Highlights from participants related to RISS (difficult to hear, bad acoustics)
· Tony White, moderator, Creative Processes and Formats: Artist’s Publishing, Fine Press, and the Altered Book
· RISS members were well represented on panels and in poster sessions
· Emilee mentions groups like ours could provide model for directions to move the group— liaisons from RUSA, ACRL, IFLA, could report back to RISS

· Floor is opened for discussion
moderators ask people to discuss their vision for RISS

· Kayla from Simmons mentions that she’s doing a blog for resources in art and
annotating them

· Amy speaks about being the liaison for multiple subjects and working the general ref desk—wonders how many of us have integrated into other subjects—how is the silo disintegrating?

· Margret Erickson at Colby College offers her opinion that specialized subjects are on their way out

· How to triage question—Evan, whom works one day week at public library, is happy if he can catch art questions, wonders how do we help non-art librarians manage these questions?

· Jennifer Helman (IUPUI) discusses visual literacy and keeping our generalized skills up to par to stay relevant

· Libguides are commonly used for sourcing subjects outside one’s area; cross-training in different areas of library helps

o Material for possible session here?
o Heather Koopmans says there’s a session dealing with visual cross-training (and leadership?) at the conference
· Questions about assessing reference transactions
· Amy says her chats are recorded and they assess them somewhat,
· Important to be able to assess our services to prove that they’re valuable
· Adeane Bregman from Boston College says they don’t even have a “reference desk”
anymore

· Emilee wraps up by saying these would make great sessions and that the conversation should continue